Under the Dome (an early review, pre-read)

I'm a Stephen King fan, I'll admit it freely. For a fun read, and for my money, there are few authors that can spin a perfectly mindless yarn while being entertaining, keeping me on the edge, and also write pretty well all at the same time. (My Scottish friends out there might be pleased to note that I've recently added Ian Rankin to that list.) I like to mix up my reading: something non-fiction, then something fiction; something heavy, then something light. Keeps the palate cleansed so to speak.

Also, I've been collecting Stephen King original hardcovers for, oh, about fifteen years now, ever since a buddy of mine in college showed me his collection of Stephen King original hardcovers, and I totally got caught up in my own envy. (I mean, to a book nerd like me, that was freakin' cool.) I'm not ridiculously hard-core about it. I don't go out and find the original hardcovers of books that I've missed (although I would love an original copy of It one of these days, just because I loved that book as kid). I have most everything he's written from the early 90's on. Before that, I had paperbacks that I don't own anymore. But these days, if it comes out, I generally buy it in hardback right away.

So when I got an email from Amazon a little while ago telling me that they were selling Steve's new one for $9 (down from a cover price of $35) I pre-ordered in a hurry. It came in the mail yesterday.

Now, two things I noticed before I even read it. Three things really. Well, four.

First of all, the cover is stunning. There is a blurb on the Amazon page for this book explaining all of the graphic art and CGI that went into it, but really, outstanding.

Second, the plot. Here it is from the publisher in a nutshell:

On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener's hand is severed as "the dome" comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when -- or if -- it will go away.

Dale Barbara, Iraq vet and now a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens -- town newspaper owner Julia Shumway, a physician's assistant at the hospital, a select-woman, and three brave kids. Against them stands Big Jim Rennie, a politician who will stop at nothing -- even murder -- to hold the reins of power, and his son, who is keeping a horrible secret in a dark pantry. But their main adversary is the Dome itself. Because time isn't just short. It's running out.

Anything about that strike you as familiar? Say, maybe, the 2007 Simpsons Movie? (If you haven't seen it, trust me, it's similar. The town of Springfield gets encapsulated by a huge dome, although for completely comedic reasons, and of course Homer & Co. have to save the day once Marge pulls Homer's head out of his ass. Sort of like a long episode, but with a dome, over a city, that the occupants of which were under. Sound familiar?)

Now, I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice this similarity, the blogosphere must be abuzzin', but I got to wondering what could Steve possibly be thinking? In the back of the book, he's got one of his usual Author's Notes (addressed to me, or "Constant Reader" as he likes to call me) where he tells me that he actually started this story in 1976 and put it away because it was too challenging. "I had this idea first," he's clearly saying, preemptively staving off the naysayers among us. Then he clearly admits to starting it over again back in 2007. Really Steve? In 2007? I wonder what could have possibly prompted you to tackle this subject again.

Now, I've often speculated about how it must feel to an author to find one of his (or her) ideas used elsewhere, completely innocently, no plagiarism involved. Certainly it's possible for two people to come up with the same idea independently. I expounded upon it a little during my review of Quietus a few years ago. I, myself, had that problem earlier this year. Back in the summer of '08 (way back in the dark ages) I started work on a novel about a guy who could tell if people were lying to him and how he used that gift and how it used him, etcetera. Then, this fall, the Fox Broadcasting Company premiered a TV show about a guy who can tell if people are lying. (Bugger!) Oh well. I had pretty much run into a brick wall with it anyway, but now I'm really done. Maybe ten years from now I might revisit, but at the moment it would be way too soon, too obvious a connection to pop culture. Nobody would believe that I'd thought of it all on my own, even if I did put in an Author's Note explaining that I had the idea first, all the way back in 2008.

My point? Steve, you should have let some time pass before you tried to publish this one. I realize you're getting older and want to get a few more books written before your time runs out, but maybe this one should have stayed on the shelf a few more years until the memory of The Simpsons movie has faded. Trust me, you and Matt Groenig have a lot of the same readers. And at $527 million world-wide gross, more than just a few people saw that little flick.

Third: he's done this before, written a book with an obvious pop-culture inspiration. Duma Key, his last one (that I read, anyway) was about a guy who painted things that came true. Like in Heroes, that TV show that nobody's really watching any more. I stood up for you then, Steve. I'm not doing it again.

Fourth: the length. Have you seen this book? It's freaking huge. It's the biggest King book on my shelf. I have to go back to Insomnia before I find one that's even close. We're talking something along The Stand proportions. 1072 pages. I was initially quite excited. I like it when Steve goes all epic-proportions on us. Those are usually the most fun to read. I mean, seriously, have you read The Stand? Awesome book. So yeah, I was stoked.

Until I opened the book, that is.

Did you ever have to write a ten-page report for school and you increased the font to 13-point and widened the margins to 1.5" just to get your sparse text to spill onto that 10th page? (Our teachers weren't fooled, were they?  But they couldn't say much because they hadn't specified layout metrics.) Yeah, this feels the same. The font is almost so big that I wondered if I got one of the "large print" books for people with poor eyesight. The margins are wide enough to draw very complex flip-book style animations in it and have room left for notes about the economy or anything else that comes to mind. The paper is obnoxiously thick, almost as if the publishers wanted the book to appear thicker than it really was. By comparison, David Foster Wallace's magnum opus, Infinite Jest, has nearly the same number of pages, is about a quarter-inch thinner, and just glancing at how small the print is and how many lines he gets on a page (43 lines per page compared to Steve's 35 lines) and a font size that probably gets about 25% more words per line, I'm guessing he's got about twice as many actual words in his 1076 pages.

This is not Steve's fault, of course. The publishers can't charge $35 per book for an inch-thick volume. So they padded it with extra paper (relatively cheap) and jacked up the price. I got my copy for nine bucks, so what am I complaining about? The sucker's heavy. That's all. I'm anxious to read that thing (after November of course) but I think I might get carpal tunnel just trying to hold it up.

I've rambled on long enough. Need to get back to my own writing.  If/when I read it, I'll come back and tell you if I thought it was worth the $9. The last one was. The one before that wasn't.

NaNo Day 10 and a Bit of a Scare (not in that order)

After Sunday's Bedroom Destroying Excitement (which was so much fun in the aftermath), B.B. was a little sluggish the rest of the day, but we chalked that up to the excitement of destroying thousands of dollars of custom window treatments. (It's not every day, after all, that you can increase your personal cost of ownership by a double-digit percentage in one fell swoop.) She came home from the dog park that morning a little sluggish, too (this was pre- the destructive rampage) and for the first in recorded history she didn't eat all of the food we gave her for lunch. She ate about three-quarters of it and then just laid down. That worried us a bit, but since she likes pumpkin (and thank God the Libby's people solved whatever distribution problem they were having earlier) which is good for the digestion, it somehow has the double effect of speeding up things that are slow or slowing down things that are happening too fast, or so we've read, we gave her a little bit on top of the one-quarter food she had left to encourage her to finish. Then we left her alone while we went out to lunch, and the rest is history.

But she didn't eat all of her food at dinner either and struggled over breakfast, too. Now, that could have been because K fed her three slices of Pepperidge Farm's White Bread in the evening because our vet had once told us a story of a dog who ate some sewing needles and the owner gave him white bread which coated the needles and allowed them to pass without tearing up the dogs intestines. But I think perhaps the bread, being something totally new to her, upset her stomach a little.

In the morning she clearly wasn't feeling herself, but she did eat breakfast and K took her to the park to run around, but something was clearly wrong. They came home for lunch and B.B. only had a few bites. So K called the vet and asked what she should do. He recommended we bring B.B. in for an x-ray, better to be safe than sorry. We had to leave her there because they needed the afternoon to sedate her (and I have to confess that I don't like leaving B.B. somewhere that I am not). They found little bits of metal from the flashing around the outsides of the blinds, but the vet said it probably wasn't anything to worry about. Still, though, we worry anyway. She came home, ate the rest of her lunch as dinner, and slept a lot (she was groggy because of the sedative). The vet encouraged us to take her on short walks to encourage her to, well, you know. He said the x-rays showed that she was likely blocked up by something, but he didn't know what. So we did. We walked her several times around the neighborhood, very slowly since she was stumbling around like a drunken sailor (no offense to any sailors reading this). Mostly she just slept as we watched her.

This morning she seems back to her usual self. We got up at five, had a bit of a walk around the yard, she ate her breakfast in usual lightening-fast style that she normally does, and then she chased the cat around, who seemed curious himself to know what was going on with her and just wanted to be in the same room with us. She's lying on the floor next to me right now, watching me type, and Gus is next to me watching her.

I don't like to think about anything bad happening to anybody in my family, K, Gus, B.B. I call them "my girls" even though Gus is technically not (he doesn't mind, though). Yesterday while B.B. was at the vet, I had this feeling of increasing panic rise up in me because she was somewhere that I couldn't just reach out and assure her that everything would be all right, even if it I didn't know that for sure. I knew she was scared by herself and didn't like being without us. Takes us back, full circle, to why she did what she did to the bedroom yesterday. In her little crate (which actually has enough room for her to move around in and almost stretch out, but we can't help our negative reaction to the fact that it is basically a cage) she probably can't do much more than just sit around idle. Given the space of an entire bedroom, her own rising levels of panic probably took over. I guess I can understand that, although I will say that in an entire afternoon without her yesterday I didn't destroy anything more than a grand latte from Starbucks.

Enough of that sentimental crap

Moving on...

NaNoWriMo Day 10. I'm just over the 20,000 words mark and feeling pretty good about it. I've gotten past Chapter One, which was my introduction to the Main Character, background about him, and leading up to an integral part of his storyline that sets everything in motion. Chapter Two always was going to be a transition into the main setting and the formal story-line which would start in Chapter Three, but I needed it to be more than just a couple of paragraphs saying, "...and then he moves to a new place and meets new people." Boring.

Something that fascinates me about creative writing is the creative part. Sometimes, as I'm writing, I just let my mind wander and stumble upon things I hadn't thought of before. For instance, I introduced a character who my main character needed to interact with during this Chapter Two transition, and in the course of writing I realized this new character was more interesting than I'd thought. The more I wrote about him (and he was never supposed to be in more than a couple pages) I found out that he could be useful. I think I'll bring him back later when the plot needs someone like him, which it will. The reader, at that point, will think, "Yeah, I remember that guy" because he got the chance to do some interesting things in Chapter Two that will impact the Main Character going forward.

So that's the interesting part, discovering little gems that you didn't know about. (Not precious gems like diamonds or rubies, because we're not writing at that caliber; more like feldspar or quartz.) You stumble upon them as you get your character from Point A to Point B. There are stops along the way and sometimes you run into interesting people there.

My guy (which is what I'll the MC) had to stop by a hospital in Chapter One and look for someone, just a brief visit but it was necessary to the plot. I had to write in someone at the front desk who he could talk to. So I did. I knew I was going to have to, but I didn't think much of it before I got to that particular scene. So I patterned this woman slightly after a character in a TV show that K and I watch, Nurse Jackie, if you've ever seen it, starring Edie Falco with a great little butch hairstyle who has a well intentioned, somewhat buffoon-ish, always sweet, nursing student assistant named Zooey working for her who became the inspiration for the nurse at the front desk. She didn't have to do much more than say a couple lines and be nice to my guy, but because of the image I have in my head, I feel like she could come back and play a much larger role if I needed her to. She probably won't. He's moving on. But that's what I'm talking about. Little gems. One of the things I like about writing.

Tomorrow I'll bore you with my thoughts on first-person vs. third-person narrative, but I warned you a couple days ago to ignore my rambling. If you're still reading at this point, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Minor Setback

We left B.B. alone for the first time today outside of her crate. We'd gone out for lunch, only for about an hour and a half, and left her closed up in our bedroom. We thought that would give her some room to stretch. She'd just come back from a couple hours at the dog park and she was tired. We figured she'd just sleep while we were gone.

Wrong.

I'll leave this up as long as I can. YouTube didn't like my background music, but I thought it was perfect.

B.B. Did a Bad Bad Thing @ Yahoo! Video

NaNo - Chapter One Finished

Well, I'm making some progress, that's for sure. Five days in, and I'm up to 14,103 words. I'm well ahead of where I wanted to be at this point. By now, I should be at 8,333 words, so I feel pretty good. Of course, as is my fear, that's when things usually fall out from under my feet. It's always the easiest for me to write the beginning of a novel because that's the part I've spent the most time thinking about. I might need to take a little break and think (just a bit) about what I want to happen in chapter two. Granted, I know what needs to happen, but how to get from where I am now to where I need to be...

Well, I'm sure it will all work out. We NaNoWriMo'ers got a nice email from Jasper Fforde today who basically said that what we're writing doesn't need to be good, doesn't need to be anything at all, except practice for the real thing. Even the Beatles, he said (I'm paraphrasing) started out small and practiced until they got good.

Well, I'm not sure if any of us should be favorably compared to the Beatles, or even referred to in the same email, but I see where he's going with that. How many people can say they've written a novel in their lifetimes? I certainly can't. I've written several starts, and one I nearly finished, but I've never completed one. I'd like to, one day, say I did, even if it never gets read by anybody. (Although secretly I'm hoping that if I ever do finish one, K will read it and lie to me when she tells me it was great.)

Oh the other thing I wanted to say was that K and I watched a movie called Antichrist tonight which has completely messed me up, so I think it would be a good thing if I took a little break from writing for a day, maybe two, lest a combination of stillborn deer, talking foxes and genital mutilation work their way into chapter two.  Wow, avoid that movie unless you're really interested.  It's not for the faint of heart.

NaNo – Day Two

Day two of this writing extravaganza and I'm still going strong, although to be fair, the last time I did this, my stamina didn't peter out until well past the 30,000-word mark. So far, I'm up to 5,854 words, so just a little ahead of where I should be at the end of day two.

I'm having a little struggle, internally, with this project. My writing professor in college, Dr. Welt, always told me that a story is as long as it needs to be. I asked her how long a novel was, and that was the answer I got. She was adamant about that. If it's a short story, then that's what it is. If it's a novel, then that's what it is. If it falls somewhere in between, then so be it. Just write what you want to write and don't write any more than that.

Here, though, I can feel myself stretching things out because of last time, when I ran out of things to say before the end of 50,000 words. I'm in the same spot this time around, or at least I'm afraid I will be. I've got the beginning of this story pretty well fleshed out, the middle is fuzzy but I definitely know what I want to happen and who the principle characters are (although my character gets locked up in an asylum by then so I'm sure he's going to meet all sorts of interesting people that I haven't thought up yet), and the end is something of a blur, where I only know the most high-level details of what will happen. Granted, I'll know more about what happens in the middle once I finish the beginning, and I'll know more about what happens in the end once I finish the middle, but my fear is that I'll need more than 30 days to figure all that out. I'm just not smart enough to keep all of the details of an entire novel in my head at one time. General plot outlines, yes. Motivations of a dozen different characters, no.

But I guess this is just an exercise in discipline and endurance. This novel doesn't need to be great. If I stretch out scenes with particularly flowering writing, who cares. The most important thing is to finish the 50k on time. After that, if I want, I can go back and edit to my heart's content. Although, admittedly, I haven't touched the story I started 2 years ago. Maybe after this one is done I can go back to that one and see what needs excising. (Probably a lot.)

Anyway, pardon my rambling. Just wrapping up for the evening. K and I had B.B. in puppy class earlier tonight, teaching her the ever-elusive "heel" command and sitting and staying with the three big D's (distance, distraction and duration). If K hadn't taken B.B. for a long visit at the dog park earlier, I don't think we would have done nearly as well as we did. They are now downstairs watching TV together while I'm up here writing. But I think I'm done for the night.

Holidays and NaNo

Happy Halloween!

Our most favorite of holidays. We dressed as suburbanites, again, although K wore black and orange in a festivy way so that added to the ensemb, and passed out candy. I made my holiday standard dinner, my semi-famous spaghetti, but because Halloween fell on a Saturday this year, I was able to cook it in the crock pot all day long. We dipped into it a little during lunch, but the real treat was dinner, when it had literally been simmering for about 8 hours in the pot. Something about that really makes the flavors meld together. We watched The Shining while we listened for the doorbell.

Last year we did not have enough candy to pass out to everyone. We always buy a lot, then wonder if we bought too much, so at first we pass out handfuls to each kid (who leaves our doorstep with a bright smile and huge eyes), and then we get worried as the night progresses that we may not have enough, given the rate of candy leaving the door (oh, and we eat some too, don't get me wrong) so we pass out less and less until the last of it is gone and we have to shut off all the lights and blow out the candle in the pumpkin on the front to ward off any further trick-or-treaters.

Last year, the final group of kids had a small boy hiding behind them, whom K couldn't see, so she divvied up the last of it to the kids that she could see thinking that we were lucky to have gotten rid of it all that year. However, when they turned to leave, this adorable little boy came walking up from behind them with his orange pumpkin candy bucket in his hands, held out to K with a "I'm too shy to say trick-or-treat, but you know what I want" look on this face. K, thinking she knew more about candy than a 2-year-old, put her closed hand, empty mind you, into his pumpkin, and then pulled it back out again, open this time, as if to mime dropping candy in. The kid looked in the pumpkin, and with savant-like mental agility, quickly realized that the candy count had not changed. With huge eyes staring right at her, almost accusatory, almost pleading, he lifted up the pumpkin to her again. All she could do is say, "I'm sorry, I don't have any more." He walked away with no smile that night. If he'd been older, we would have been the target of a trick, for sure. We hid in the dark house the rest of the evening and hoped no one else would ring the bell.

So this year I bought nearly $50 worth of candy. (All candy bars, by the way. I remember, as a kid, loving those the most. We could eat a couple pieces a day, legally, and the candy bars would go first. Then anything sugary, e.g., Sweet Tarts. Then maybe the suckers. Then, last, the Tootsie Rolls. Only the lamest of houses gave away suckers and Tootsie Rolls. That was my opinion, anyway. And I don't want to be lame in my old age.) I hit the Target on Thursday and filled up the basket. Probably too full. Definitely too full.

Today we still have half of it left. We had fewer kids at the door last night. I don't know why, maybe it was because Halloween fell on a Saturday and given the whole day to plan, people on our street found better things to do than walk around and peddle for candy, but we only got about 10 sets of kids total. Which is probably good, because there are exactly two nude scenes in The Shining (one during the scene showing Dick Hallorann's house in Florida where he's got these large prints of a naked black woman on his wall with the huge 70's afro, and the other scene, which you probably remember, where the full-frontal naked bird gets out of the tub in room 237 and starts making out with Jack) and the kids rang the bell smack-dab in the middle of both. So while K was passing out candy, I was sitting in the living room with B.B., holding onto her collar so she doesn't make a run for the door, and hoping all the while that the innocent gaggle of disguised tricksters can't see the paused image of naked boobies on the TV screen just inside the house.

But I digress...

There's a lot of candy let to be eaten. I may have to come up with a new exercise regime if I'm going to be participating in the fun. Which I will be. And our favorite holiday is over, once again, but that's okay, too. We will enjoy it every year.

NaNoWrimo 2009

So today, I've got something new going on. Every November, for the entire month, about 150,000 people around the world write a novel, and this year, once again, I'm going to be one of them. I've tried this before, twice, and have succeeded and failed once each. I'm doing it for fun, you understand. There is no prize, other than to say you did it. There is no other reason except for those of us who have always wanted to write, it's a good feeling to know that we're all writing at the same time.

NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month. Evidenced by this web site here. You start writing after midnight on the 1st, and you have a full month to come up with 50,000 words. Why 50,000? Probably because it's a nice even number that is actually doable. You need to write 1,667 words a day. That's a little over 3 single-spaced pages.

I've got about 1,975 words written since this morning. We'll see how I'm doing 29 days from now.

One thing I do know is that nothing sparks the creative juices like writing here in this blog. So even though I've left it unattended for a while (for about as long as we've had a dog, if you look back, so you can see what's been occupying my time for seven months) I'll be stopping by here for a while to ramble on about whatever helps get me moving again over on the NaNo front.

Feel free to ignore me.

McSweeney's 32

© 2009 McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and the contributors, San Francisco, California

Last year we asked a dozen or so writers to travel somewhere in the world—Budapest, Cape Town, Houston, any sleep or sleepless outpost they could find—and send back a story set in that spot fifteen years from now, in the year 2024.  Only ten returned alive (and Doerr with a broken leg), but their stories are what you'll find here.  The predictions, at least on the municipal level, are pretty grim—not enough good water, too much bad water, several distressing developments in personal electronics.  But civilization persists nevertheless, and it offers some small consolation that each of these stories provides a picture of the little guy or gal persistently carving out a life.  One reason we asked our writers to look ahead on fifteen years, in stead of fifty or five hundred, is because we wanted to hear about where we'd be—to see what the world could look like when things had shifted just a bit, as it seems like they're starting to, heading into the second decade of the third millennium, with the long presence of our forty-third president come to an end and a semitangible future at last seeming imminent.  For better or for worse, this feels like a dynamic moment, in the world and in the work we do with ink and paper and in the changing physiques of our editorial board, who are all twelve years old, if you didn't know that.  The best fiction set in years ahead can deepen that feeling of impending possibility; these stories, we think, are grounded in that spirit, and now is a good time to read them.

Editor: Dave Eggers

McSweeney's 31

© 2009, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and the contributors, San Francisco, California.

Every so often, we'll have a meeting here at the McSweeney's HQ, where we ask interns—our heroes and lifeblood—to tell us what they would put in the magazine if they had their druthers. Over the years, the results have been pretty great. Dominic Luxford, and intern a few years ago, wanted poetry in McSweeney's, so we asked him to come up with an innovative way to present it. The result was Poets Picking Poets, which became a section of Issue 22 and later a standalone paperback book. Not too long after that issue appeared, Darren Franich and Graham Weatherly pitched the idea of an issue celebrating neglected or deceased literary forms, and it immediately intrigued everyone. they went at the idea with a vengeance, and a year later—the research, commissioning, writing and editing of this issue took a very long time—here we are, with an astonishing array of forms and genres that you've likely never heard of, but which you might very well grow attached to. The pantoum, for example, has already become popular around the office and among our online readers (many of whom sent in their examples of the form). And we expect that the whore dialogue, hilarious and profane and very practical, might catch on again, especially with our readers, many of whom are experts in both cleaning and sexual technique. So we hope you'll enjoy this issue, and that those of you who have recently graduated or been laid off will consider McSweeney's for your internship needs. You will be valued, if not adequately paid.

Editor: Dave Eggers

Death by Ennui

In her essay entitled "Edward Gorey: Mildly Unsettling," Karen Wilkin begins by writing, "If you say (the name) 'Edward Gorey' you are most likely to get one of two reactions: a blank "Who?" or an excited outpouring of enthusiasm." I fall squarely into the second category.

K introduced me to Edward Gorey during our early years back in Chicago, and his peculiar, erudite style certainly felt apropos of our unconventional courtship: equal parts art and cartoon, whimsy and pathos blended with a fine attention to detail. My inaugural foray was with his Gashlycrumb Tinies. (Check it out before that link goes away, as I'm certain it will.) I was fascinated by the detail in the little book, by the clever play on words, by the macabre nature of the whole thing, by how nonchalant Gorey dealt with the deaths of 26 consecutive children. Since then, we've engaged on a full-on love affair with the man and his work, buying everything we get our hands on, and sometimes twice over when we individually and simultaneously stumble on something that we don't already have.

When I saw this book available on Library Thing's Early Reviewers list, I quickly threw my hand up and requested a copy, and was subsequently thrilled beyond belief that of the 1318 members doing the same, I got one of the 15 copies available.

Elegant Enigmas is essentially a catalog from an exhibition that the Brandywine River Museum has organized, on display through May 15 of this year (2009). As such, I wish Pennsylvania was closer. I'd love to see it.

Wilkin's essay, the text of the catalog, is a good introduction to Gorey. There are certainly other, more well-rounded books out there that go into greater depth (a few notable offerings by Wilkin herself, e.g., The World of Edward Gorey), but she provided what was needed for a coffee table entry into the man's work. The work itself is the real treat, and Pomegranate Press spared no expense in faithfully depicting a well chosen set of prints. From classic examples ("N is for Neville who died of ennui") to one of my favorites, The West Wing, you get a good sense of the scope and breath of Gorey's work, what influenced him, and how his craft evolved. One of my favorite additions were his sketches showing drafts for a few pages with which I was already intimately familiar, showing me that he did not, as I previously assumed, simply sit down with pen to paper and see what evolved. (Not all the time, anyway.)

So, to bring this full circle, if you're scratching your head with a blank expression on your face wondering who in the world Edward Gorey is, well I'm not sure this is a book you'd be interested in. Check out one of the Amphigorey's for a good first impression. However, if you're like us and you collect everything you can get your hands on, this will be an excellent addition to your library.

Wild Things

What excites me most about this trailer? Is it Dave Egger's name in the screenplay credits? Is it the awesome Arcade Fire track (Wake Up, brilliant) playing in the background? Is it the name Spike Jonze, period? Or is it just the fact that somebody made a well-intentioned movie of one of my childhood favorite books?

Too soon to tell. Could be all of that. Yeah.